The Basics: Pick up your TV remote, find a cop movie on cable, watch it for three minutes, then find another, watch it for three minutes and then just keep doing that for the next couple of hours. There's your plot. Mismatched buddy cops working outside the system, drug rings, funny violence, a kidnapped woman, some execution-style murders. You've seen this before. In fact, director Kevin Smith is sort of counting on you not only to have seen it before, but to have seen it over and over and lovingly fused it with your own DNA until you are the perfect human guinea pig for this movie-remix lab experiment.

What's The Deal: No, Smith didn't write it, but he might as well have. Because it's a Kevin Smith movie even before it's a Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan movie. And like every other Smith movie ever made, the point is not the stuff happening on screen. The point is Smith selling you his brand, and that brand is his deeply held conviction that the world really is a place where impersonating Oprah's "I loves Harpo" speech from The Color Purple is not only the funniest thing ever, but that it's something guys sitting around smoking weed do when they want to crack each other up. It's not, but wouldn't we all be happier, dumber and more relaxed if it were? Your propensity toward laughter during this movie's running time will directly correlate to how much you already believe. My vote is with the Oprah monologue on this one and I'm only feeling halfway guilty about that.

Best Stuff In The Buffet: A foul-mouthed child criminal, Harold Faltermeyer's ripping-himself-off score, Curb Your Enthusiasm's Susie Essman as the one person in the movie who refuses to say the F-word, Seann William Scott as Crime-Stifler, the new Patti Labelle song

Problems: Smith’s love of long takes where people talk about nothing in particular just isn’t right for this movie. It might have been, but since he didn’t write it, much of the dialogue sounds a lot like what his characters would say, except it's missing the creative NC-17-style profanity he’s the master of delivering. And because that shocking language is so much a part of the Smith world, the toned-down version of that back-and-forth just feels like somebody impersonating him for Grandma.

What's Probably Coming Next If This Is A Hit: That Fletch remake he's always wanted to do. Wait for it and you'll hear that movie's theme song thrown into the final moments here.

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